“‘This’?” Trevor echoed. There was a dangerous note in his voice that would have warned a man of lesser courage to back off.
But Emilio obviously ignored it. “Yeah. You here, her there.” His customary grin was gone, replaced by a look of concern. “Don’t you think it’s time to bridge the gap?”
Trevor resisted the urge to tell his assistant to mind his own business. He started chopping an onion. “It’s not up to me.”
Emilio had always believed that every man was captain of his own destiny. The comment didn’t sit well with him. “Then who’s it up to?”
Trevor tilted the cutting board over the pot of sauce, sending the diced onion pieces into the red, bubbling sea. “Her.”
Emilio raised his eyebrows. “She’s supposed to come after you?”
“Not after me, to me.” Slamming the cutting board down on the large metal table, he made more noise than he’d intended. Trevor lowered his voice. “I’m not the one who left.”
Emilio shook his head, compassion entering his features. “Trevor, you’re a great boss and a fantastic chef, but what you don’t know about women could fill the Grand Canyon.”
Everyone knew that Emilio loved the ladies and they loved him back. To Trevor, it had always seemed like rather an empty existence, partying all the time without that one particular someone who mattered beside you. He didn’t want Emilio’s pity.
Picking up a large wooden spoon, Trevor blended the onion deep into the sauce. A flurry of mozzarella cheese came next, disappearing into the sauce like the diced onion.
“Oh?”
“Yeah, ‘oh.’” Emilio moved to get into Trevor’s line of sight. “A woman wants to have a guy come after her, make her feel that she’s worth the effort, that the guy will fight to have her in his life.”
Trevor frowned. He could just hear his sister’s reaction to that philosophy. “That’s stereotypical and sexist.”
“That’s life,” Emilio insisted with feeling. “I’ve got five sisters, remember? Not one of them is happy calling all the shots. Don’t get me wrong, they all like to manipulate,” he quickly interjected, “but they also like the idea of being rescued.”
Trevor stopped stirring and looked at him. “Rescued,” he echoed.
The grin on Emilio’s face was worthy of a man who had just shared the secrets of the universe. “That’s the word. Rescued. That other guy’s not any good for her, I don’t care how many expensive suits he owns.”
“Rescued,” Trevor repeated again. Clearly his assistant wasn’t getting enough sleep because of the wild life he led. “From a billionaire who could give her anything she ever dreamed of.”
The small frown on Emilio’s lips indicated that he felt Trevor had missed the point. “From a guy who’s a control freak. I did a little research on that Baylor Evans guy and besides being a workaholic, he also likes his women to be available whenever he wants them.”
“What women? He wants Venus—Gemma—to marry him.” Trevor still couldn’t get his mouth around the other name. To him, she was Venus. The name suited her.
“I don’t know about her, but I was talking about his fancy women.” The smile on Emilio’s face was nothing short of wicked. “The ones Mr. Billionaire can’t bring home to mother.”
“How would you know this?” Trevor asked.
The wicked smile turned smugly secretive. “Hey, there are ways to find things out. You just gotta know where to look, who to ask.”
Billionaire or not, the man was a lowlife—just as he’d pegged him, Trevor thought.
“You’d be rescuing her from a pretty miserable marriage—” Emilio was saying.
His mind was drifting again. Trevor forced himself to focus. “Maybe it’s what she wants.” In any case, he was done, he was moving on, he silently insisted. Trevor felt Emilio’s dark eyes boring into him expectantly. “Look, she hasn’t called. I’ve had the cell phone on me 24/7 and nothing.”
“So? Don’t stand on ceremony,” Emilio insisted. “You’re making a mistake…in the kitchen—” he nodded at the honey jar on the counter “—and in your life.”
They’d closed twenty minutes ago. He was just trying to get a jump start on the spaghetti sauce for tomorrow’s featured item on the menu. He’d been told that people drove for two hours just to eat his sauce. They’d stop coming if they sampled the dish after he’d emptied the contents of that jar of honey into it.
But he’d be damned if he was going to admit it.
“Go home, Emilio. Don’t you have someone waiting for you?” What was the most recent girl’s name? “Susannah?” he guessed.
“Shirley.”
Trevor nodded. He got back to work. “Knew it started with S.”
As Trevor went to another stove, Emilio dogged his tracks, not about to give up easily. “Go to her. Everyone here will thank you for it. You haven’t been the same since she left.”
Trevor wanted to protest that he’d been exactly the same, but he knew it was a lie. He hadn’t been the same. He’d felt lost and out of sorts, and yesterday, when Mike called to ask how he was doing, he’d all but taken his older brother’s head off. That wasn’t like him at all.
He used to be the patient one, the easygoing one, as his stepmother pointed out when she called about twenty minutes later. News traveled fast on the Marlowe grapevine. Even that had irritated him and he had never, ever gotten irritated because of anything Kate said to him.
Emilio was right, he thought, turning off the heat beneath the pot. He’d let the sauce simmer a few minutes, then put it into the refrigerator. In the interim, he’d put away the few leftovers from tonight’s menu into the freezer. First thing tomorrow, the leftovers were going to St. Anne’s Homeless Shelter.
But as for him, the second he finished locking up, he would talk to Travis, who had some connections at the police force. Maybe he could find out where Venus had gone. Not just find out where she’d gone, but bring her back from there, as well. He didn’t care what “Gemma” did, but Venus was coming back with him. He might as well admit it, he needed her and there was no use pretending that he didn’t.
The hell with being noble and doing what was best for her. Marrying someone like Baylor Evans wasn’t best for her. Evans could never love her the way he did and there were more important things than money in this world.
There was love.
And damn it, he wasn’t giving up his, not without a fight.
Trevor hit the main switch that controlled the kitchen lights, turning them off. He began to make his way to the back office, to make sure that the computer was shut down for the night before he left. Now that he’d decided what to do, he was anxious to get rolling.
When he heard the voice, he thought he was hallucinating.
“They’ll go bad by morning if you leave them out.”
If he turned around, she wouldn’t be there, he silently told himself. Just like the other times he’d thought he heard Venus’s voice, only to discover that it was just his mind working overtime. Taunting him.
“The salad is the first step to a memorable dining experience,” the soft voice went on to say. “Isn’t that what you told me?”
Frozen in place, his very shoulder muscles ached. Okay, Trevor reasoned, he was either certifiable, or she was here.
He swung around, half-afraid he was losing his mind, fervently praying that he’d see her standing there—even if seeing her meant that he had lost his mind.
Adrenaline drummed wildly through his system.
It was her.
Venus.
She was standing in his kitchen before the butcher-block table where he’d absently left half a tray of side salads. In his haste to finish, he’d forgotten all about them.
Moving forward, Venus glanced down at the small plates. “I see you’ve replaced me.”
He was afraid to breathe. Afraid that if he did, he’d wake up. And she’d be gone. “Not possible,” he murmured.
As he watched, her lips curved into
a smile that shot straight to his gut, further immobilizing him. “Because I was so good, or so bad?”
Okay, if he didn’t breathe, he was going to pass out. Ever so slowly, he pulled air into his lungs. She was still there.
“Because you were you. Unique.” He drew nearer, not fully conscious of the process of putting one foot in front of the other. Just desperate to be close to her.
Her perfume filled his head. Another trick of the mind? “Is it really you?”
Her smile widened as her eyes met his. “As far as I know.”
“And who are you?” Was she Gemma? Or his Venus?
The smile turned mysterious. Eat your heart out, Mona Lisa. “A question for the ages.”
Her answer told him what he wanted to know. “You remember.”
She nodded her head slowly. “Everything. My name, my isolated childhood. Baylor. Everything,” she repeated.
“And you’ve come to say goodbye,” he guessed, feeling heartsick. What other conclusion could there be? On the one hand was a life in which she could have everything she ever wanted or aspired to, on the other was working for a living. Not much of a contest there, he thought cynically.
“No, I’ve come to say hello,” she replied, measuring out each word as if it was cast in gold.
Trevor was afraid to hope. He wanted it spelled out for him. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” she informed him patiently, “that I’ve given up waiting for you to come riding up on a white charger to rescue me from the pompous ass I was engaged to.”
If he was dreaming, he hoped he’d never wake up. But even asleep, he needed things to make sense.
“If he’s such a pompous ass, why were you engaged to him?”
Another question for the ages, she thought. “Didn’t know any better.” Actually, there was more to it than that. “I thought all men were more or less alike. I lived among very self-centered, privileged people with my father as a male role model.” She toyed with one of the salads, turning the plate around and around as she talked. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but Hayden Burnett was the king of the self-centered people.”
He knew very little about the world she came from. Until recently, it had nothing to do with him. “He’s dead?”
She nodded. “Died of a heart attack last year. Baylor was his successor. At the bank and, apparently, in my life.” A great deal had come flooding back to her in a very short time. Even though they were her memories, she was still sorting them all out. And seeing things in a very different light. “I don’t blame him for what he is, he can’t help it. Apparently, he didn’t have any good role models, either. His father was never home, too busy working, and his mother tried to drown herself one martini at a time.” Drawing closer, she smiled up into his eyes. “Not like you.” She thought about that for a moment. “Although I suspect that you probably would have been you even if wolves had raised you.”
Oh God, she was back. This wasn’t a dream or a hallucination, she was really back. Tension instantly evaporated from his body, leaving him drained and very, very happy. “They’d have to be nice wolves, otherwise they’d have eaten me.”
She nodded, a grin struggling to take over her lips. “Good point.”
Slipping his arms around her waist, he drew her to him. “I was going to come to rescue you, you know.”
Venus lifted her head and looked up into his eyes. “Oh? When?”
He nodded back at the refrigerator, as if it could bear him out. “Right after I closed up tonight.”
She glanced over her shoulder at the neglected tray. “And left the tray of salads out.”
“My mind wasn’t on salads,” he told her, “it was on finding you.”
She did believe him. Trevor wouldn’t lie. “I guess I took the work out of that, huh?”
He cupped her face, glorying in being able to touch her after nights of yearning to do just that. “So you’ve left him?”
She nodded. She’d told Baylor in no uncertain terms that he was never going to marry her—or her substantial bank account. “Shed him like the last unwanted ten pounds on a diet.”
If he wasn’t so happy, he could have actually felt a little sorry for the worthless scum, Trevor mused. “What did he say?”
“That I’d regret it.” Baylor had said a lot of other things too, harsh, hateful things that didn’t bear repeating and only confirmed that she’d made the right choice.
“You might.” It killed him to say it, but it was true. He wanted her to be very, very sure. “I can’t give you the lifestyle you’re used to.”
Money had been important enough to her once, but not anymore. Not after she’d seen life on the other side of a banking institution. “Maybe not,” she allowed, “but I can.”
He wasn’t sure he followed her. “What?”
He was so adorable when he was confused, she thought. God, but she had missed him. Missed his eyes, his hair, the scent of his cologne, the scent of his sweat. Most of all, she missed his smile.
“Baylor Evans didn’t want me because he was head over heels in love with me, Trevor. I come with connections, a pedigree and, most of all, money.”
It didn’t seem to him that Evans needed money. “He’s a billionaire.”
“A little overexaggerated,” she corrected. “Besides, billionaires like money, too. Sometimes more than the rest of us.”
Us. He combed his fingers through her hair, framing her face. A tiny part of him was still afraid he’d suddenly wake up. “So now you’ve come over to my side.”
Her smile encompassed her eyes. “If that proposal is still open.”
How could she even ask that? “You know it is.” Unable to hold himself in check any longer, he kissed her. Hard. But then, even though he wanted to continue, to take it up to the next level and the next, he drew back. There were things he had to know. “You’ve got your full memory back?”
She threaded her arms around his neck as she nodded. “Came back to me with thunder and lightning the minute I saw my house.” She smiled. “You don’t forget a nine-thousand-square-foot ‘home.’ Mausoleum is more like it,” she admitted ruefully. It was where she had grown up, but the place had never been a home. Her mother had died when she was very young, leaving her to be raised by strangers who cared for her because they were paid to do so. Her father was hardly ever around—except to criticize her. “I also remembered that I came to the conclusion that I was making a terrible mistake, agreeing to marry Baylor.”
He wondered how much she actually did remember. “What happened that night I found you?”
She smiled up into his eyes, pressing her body against his. “I was reborn.”
He could feel himself responding to her. Wanting her. It was hard to hold himself in check. “Before that. Do you remember how you got into the water? Did you jump in?”
She shook her head. She wasn’t that foolhardy and reckless. “After I realized my mistake, I tried to get into a lifeboat in order to row back to shore. Baylor isn’t the kind of man you reason with—or to take what he considered humiliation well. He has a nasty temper. And my leaving him at the altar made him look like an even bigger idiot than he already was. But I slipped, lost my hold on the ropes, not to mention my footing, and hit the water.
“After that, I don’t remember much.” She shrugged. Whether or not she remembered didn’t matter. What mattered was that her life began the moment Trevor rescued her. “I guess survival instincts took over and I started swimming for shore.”
“Wouldn’t it have been easier just to call for help from someone on the yacht?”
“There was a party going on. I doubt if anyone would have heard me.” That was how she’d managed to slip away in the first place. Baylor had invited two hundred of his “closest” friends. “The music was too loud for anyone to hear me.”
There was still one glaring question left. “Why didn’t Baylor file a missing-person’s report on you right away?”
His actions, she thought, were v
ery typical of the man and, until she’d met Trevor, she would have thought it was typical of all men. “It was…inconvenient, I guess. He was supposed to go to Europe on business right after the ceremony. He considered it a ‘working’ honeymoon. He assumed I either fell—or jumped. The first would get him bogged down in red tape, the second would be a blow to his ego because if I jumped, that meant I preferred taking my chances with the sea and the possibility of a watery grave to marrying him. That would have been too humiliating for him to admit to, to say the least. He said he did have some of his crew search for me, but it was dark and—” Her slim shoulders rose and fell in a careless shrug.
“So why did he finally file?”
The answer was simplicity personified. And so very Baylor. “Because he’s in my will and in order to collect, I had to be declared legally dead.”
“Some guy you picked to fall in love with,” Trevor snorted.
“I didn’t pick him,” she admitted. “I was just indifferent and maybe a bit of a snob myself.” In a way, she would have deserved what she got—but life had given her a second chance with Trevor. “There was all that prestige and the bank to think of.”
“What about the bank?”
She smiled. “I have the controlling fifty-one shares, thanks to my father. For now, Baylor is the best man for the job—rotten human being, but excellent banking executive. Besides, I can always have him fired if he doesn’t perform well.” She looked up at Trevor. She wanted to feel his lips on her again. To have him make love with her again. It had been far too long. “I don’t want to talk about him anymore.”
Trevor tucked her soft form against his, resting his fingertips against the swell of her hips. “What do you want to talk about?”
“Were you really going to come after me tonight?” Lie to me. Say yes. I’ll believe you.
“Yes.”
He said it with such sincerity. She believed him. “How did you know how to find me?”
[Kate's Boys 02] - The Bride With No Name Page 15